Robert Hoekman Jr.

Robert Hoekman Jr is a rapid innovation strategist with two decades of experience in process, UX, and rapid experimentation. He is the author of several respected industry books, including his latest, Experience Required: How to become a UX leader regardless of your role (New Riders). Robert has been forging paths to achieve great UX in Agile environments since 2004, with both collocated and distributed teams. As the lone UX professional in an Agile company of 300 engineers, and tasked with improving 25 different digital products, Robert needed new methods, and found them in Toyota’s concept of Lean manufacturing. Lean offered a way to run rapid experiments, prove the business and customer merits of every idea, and measure success at every step. Over time, he earned a chair at every product development table, built a team, and permanently changed the company’s innovation process. He first wrote about the beginnings of these ideas in 2006 in his Amazon-bestselling book, Designing the Obvious (New Riders), seven years prior to the publication of the book Lean UX (Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, O’Reilly), which echoes many of the ideas he advocated for in the years between. He’s been evolving these methods and consulting for countless companies now for over 13 years. Today, he regularly applies these methods to the enterprise to make even the largest companies as nimble and innovative as the smallest.